EAGER: Extending cell phone capabilities for sensitive detection in lateral flow assays

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PI: Yager, PaulProposal: 1450187Title: EAGER: Extending cell phone capabilities for sensitive detection in lateral flow assaysSignificance:Decentralization of today's most sophisticated biochemical measurements has the potential to revolutionize many fields, from medicine to agriculture; there is great potential to reduce societal costs, improve outcomes by more frequent measurements, and make field measurements that are currently impossible. One promising decentralization approach is to couple new inexpensive disposable chemical devices with our smart phones, which provide "free" measurement and analysis capacity, and can immediately transmit data anywhere. In all such measurement, the sensitivity of the detection process determines whether the measurement is useful. Current lateral flow devices (e.g., home pregnancy tests) are rapid, robust, inexpensive, and useful, but the few commercial systems detect a small set of relatively concentrated analytes. To successfully use antibody binding or nucleic acid detection tests for lower-abundance analytes, we need a significant increase in detection sensitivity. The proposed new methods for detecting analytes in this project could bring such capacity to the lateral flow format. The aim is to minimize cost and maximize speed of adoption by implementing these methods so that they can be carried out with current or next-generation smart phones. Intellectual Description:A goal of this work is to determine whether a particular set of additional capabilities associated with cellular telephones would add significant functionality for smart phones with respect to biochemical measurement, specifically to improving the sensitivity of current and conventional lateral flow-based assays. The PI proposes ways in which next-generation phones could enhance our ability to do useful chemical detection anywhere, whether for medicine, environmental monitoring, process monitoring, laboratory science or education.The PI will utilize acoustic detection of rapid heating of the detection lines to measure the amplitude of binding. This approach is used in photoacoustic ultrasound imaging, in which the lateral flow strip detection zone is illuminated by a rapid flash of light. Alternatively, one could raster scan a bright light beam as is done in today?s commercial barcode scanners